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States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option
- trgn 1y agothis exists on very large scale for students in belgium, but not allowed for working adults.
- Nihilartikel 1y agoBelgium is overpaying for labor then! Open up those dormitories for workers and you can squeeze employee costs down at least 20% and harvest that value! (cynicism)
- parpfish 1y agoIs it possible to develop cheap SRO-style housing without needing it all to be clustered together? It's easier to convert a single building into a bunch of SRO units, but that's just a recipe for more community backlash and economic segregation.
- maxwell 1y agoYurts.
- whimsicalism 1y agoI think you're just describing standard mixed income housing, although the section 8 eligible units there are often nicer than what you would get in an SRO, they are often less nice than the market-rate.
- xnx 1y agoYes. There are all types of housing possibilities if it weren't criminalized. For example, in most cities in the US it is illegal to live in an RV.
- bunjeejmpr 1y agoYeah I would not care about RV living so long as they aren't trash pandas and general hazards. Trad homeowners with solar, grid connection could offer cheap power to help recharge faster.
- mason_mpls 1y agoAll the land around economic centers is taken by suburbs, the only direction is up. There’s nothing wrong with that, this is the natural progression of city growth. This is only becoming a problem because local communities are using their legal weight to prevent enough condos & apartments from being built to satisfy demand. So now we have more homeless people and high rent problems.
- orange_joe 1y agoThe law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the poor and the rich from living in dorms past college.
- ivape 1y agoWe seem to house inmates just fine at scale. Honestly, a prison room with internet/water isn't that bad if it was affordable.
- dpassens 1y agoWell, it is relatively easy to get into one...
- datameta 1y agoHumor aside, there are people in the US who do get arrested for misdemeanors on purpose just to spend the night in a warm jail, and those that try to get into prison to alleviate chronic homelessness
- philipkglass 1y agoDo we? Prison is expensive in the United States: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-states/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta... Arkansas is the lowest-cost state and still spends $23,000/prisoner/year. The median is $65,000/prisoner/year. 11 states spend over $100k/prisoner/year.
- ivape 1y agoWe'd obviously want to model it around something like Arkansas. Remember, prison provides reasonable security, food, and clothing. Security will generally be better since regular people are not self-selected for criminality, and those savings can be moved over to improved food. Re-using the prison model for extreme low income and homelessness is not intuitive - but so be it (sometimes you have to use an anti-pattern). Edit: $100k/prisoner/year That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly. Yeah, there's either some severe inefficiencies there (or a ton of budget pork going to the wrong things), or it's a canary in the coal mine telling us that people actually should be making at least that much to live, and the fact that they aren't is a big problem, if not the main source of our societal problems.
- eschulz 1y agoIn my town there used to be a lot of single-room units (there are of course none now), and my understanding is that the primary residents were migrant men working pretty much all day. They'd just crash in the rooms, all their meals and social events would be out in town or at their work place. I feel as though there would be a different tenant in the modern era. Some would be migrant young men trying to save every dime, but many would be those suffering mental illness, and they'd fill the unit with tons of stuff. Can you imagine how much more stuff Americans have these days than they did back in say 1900? I genuinely think that the volume of stuff/garbage would be a legitimate fire or structural hazard. No landlord would want that. Back in the old days landlords had a lot more ability to force out any tenants they didn't want.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYep the article shows a photo of a neatly kept room, the reality would be a bare mattress on the floor, piles of dirty clothes, trash, and hoarded posessions. Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space. Our city has tried "housing first" and it's been a disaster. The units are filthy, damaged, and the buildings don't pass minimal standards when the housing department inspects them because the "tenants" and their associates have destroyed them. I do believe most SROs had a "no visitors" policy so that might help somewhat but there would have to be strictly enforced requirements about not trashing or abusing the property.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoWhere are you? I think Salt Lake City did "housing first", and I seem to recall that it worked fairly well.
- closewith 1y agoThe average drug addict and the average person with mental illness is employed, well-dressed, and financially stable.
- totallykvothe 1y ago
- duxup 1y agoI wonder about demand. Who will these tenants be now? In my city they were day laborers and single poor people way back in the day. I don't know how much of that we have now / the homeless seem more like a mix now. Let alone issues of managing such places / social conflicts and so on. Not saying it isn't worth a shot, all for it. I just don't know if this eats up that much demand / houses that many people these days.
- praxulus 1y agoI know a lot of Gen Z and even Millennial adults who are still living at home well after finishing school. I'm sure plenty of them would love to get out of their parents' homes but can't afford current rents, but might be able to afford an SRO. In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.
- shayway 1y agoSpeaking as an older gen-Z-er living in with their parents, this is very true of me and many people I know around my age (most, now that I think about it). If I could live somewhere nearby that doesn't eat up 50%+ of my income I would go there in a heartbeat. On HN there's a tendency to assume people are either well-off or destitute drug addicts who have given up on life but there's a wide range in between.
- exhilaration 1y agoSomething like 40% of the homeless nationwide are actually working, employed, but unable to build up enough savings to rent an apartment. Here's just one source I found on: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-homelessness-what-the-numbers-show/ https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h... I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.
- Mistletoe 1y agoDoes anyone have pics of what the inside of one of these would have looked like?
- taeric 1y agoSomewhat glad to see this getting coverage. I question the use of "decimated" here, as it feels a bit misplaced? "How States and Cities Regulated Out ..." would have worked really well?
- idiotsecant 1y ago'decimated' means 'totally destroyed' in the same way that 'literally' means 'figuratively' now. Just roll with it. Anything else will make your head hurt.
- taeric 1y agoFair. I would still expect more leaning in to the abundance discourse, though?
- MangoToupe 1y ago"Abundance" doesn't really address housing the lower half of the market, though. The market will never be willing to provide housing at a price that everyone can afford.
- taeric 1y agoThe abundance crowd aiming to lower some regulations, though, is directly in this lane. Like, specifically so. One of their complaints is that it costs so much for the public sphere to build cheap housing. No?
- MangoToupe 1y agoSure, I'd expect them here too. I can't say I'm unhappy they're absent.
- rightbyte 1y agoNo. Those are two hills I figuratively will die on.
- jimbokun 1y agoIn my 20s I did a year long internship in Japan and lived in a dorm owned by the company I worked for. Single room with bed and desk, bathroom down the hall, shared cafeteria on the first floor with breakfast and dinner served every day (lunch expected to be eaten at the office). Not a bad set up for a young single person. Especially considering a lot of the dorm residents left early in the morning and didn’t return until the last train home.
- jedimastert 1y agoDorms are fine, but America has a long really bad history with company-run housing.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoNot a bad setup for an old single person either, or a married couple: it's much better than living under a bridge! Gets a little crowded as families grow, but people have made do in one-room houses (even with multigenerational families) for eons. Of course, the dorm room setup is less vulnerable to exploitation if the dorm is rented or purchased separately from one's employer, otherwise you not only risk losing wages (and, in the US, access to health insurance) but also your home if you're laid off. GP comment was obviously referring to Anatole France, who wrote sarcastically in 1894: > Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. > It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoShared space living works as long as your roommates don’t come back horribly drunk and reek of alcohol. True story: when I moved to Lausanne I stayed at the youth hostel for a week while looking for a place to live. The police would bring in some people in sometimes who didn’t have a place to stay…and it was pretty horrible, I’m not even sure how to describe the smell even today. Suffice to say, I got out of that hostel as quickly as possible. Youth hostels used to be able to discriminate with a lot of requirements to prevent chronic homeless from using them (you need a passport, you need to be under a certain age) but as soon as those criteria disappeared, they basically become unviable.
- anjel 1y agoIts still Fun. https://www.ymcachicago.org/community-services/housing/ https://www.ymcachicago.org/community-services/housing/
- bravesoul2 1y agoTennaments?
- MangoToupe 1y agoPublic housing is the future, baby.
- daedrdev 1y agoMany cities for example forbid single stair multi story buildings from being built, despite the lack of danger and much of their current stock being literally this, which greatly raises the costs to build denser housing since everything has to be at least a large building which are aggressively lobbied against by local NIMBYs
- cyberax 1y agoNOT A SINGLE CITY managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density. Not Tokyo, not Moscow, not Austin.
- decimalenough 1y agoThat's a non sequitur. Tokyo is plenty dense and already has affordable housing.
- staringback 1y agoYeah, affordable if you are on American digital nomad visa wages.
- socalgal2 1y agoYou have apparently no experience in Tokyo. plenty of cheap places. First one I clicked, $600 a month https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320 https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320 I can find cheaper
- dang 1y ago> You have apparently no experience Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without that bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- staringback 1y ago
- xwkd 1y agoYes, let's bring these back. In fact, why don't we just build Khrushchevkas and skip the whole proletarian revolution step? We can even start wearing the funny little hats with flaps and drink until we forget about freedom or dignity. We're beyond that anyway, aren't we? With this level of wealth inequality and these seeming like a good idea, I'd say we're gearing up for a bloody good time, to say the least.
- nlarew 1y agoIt's hard to imagine that abundant housing led to the truly adverse economic conditions in the USSR. Rather than offering a cheeky strawman perhaps you could give some real thought to alternative solutions you'd like to see?
- mupuff1234 1y agoAffordable housing is a solvable problem - the problem is that nobody at the top actually wants to solve it. Too much wealth and power tied to real estate value.
- GolfPopper 1y agoIn the United States, this seems to be true for most of the "big" challenges the country faces, from medical care to immigration and employment. They are solvable, but no one at the top likes the solutions so they allow the public to suffer, rather than even trying to solve anything. (And use the problems as rallying cries come election-time.)
- cyberax 1y agoThis article is pure bullshit. The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC. By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.
- pcaharrier 1y agoYou're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
- cyberax 1y ago> You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_. > Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion? Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich? Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive. This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers. Rinse, wash, repeat. The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact. Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
- pcaharrier 1y agoI see what you're saying: all else will not remain equal. Your argument is that any increase in supply will always be more than offset by a corresponding increase in demand.
- cyberax 1y ago
- gcanyon 1y ago> a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars). This is exactly what I rented when I moved to NYC two years ago. It was a month-to-month single room in a six-bedroom apartment. I’m not sure how legal it was, but I rented from a company with a web site, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, it was substantially more than $300/month - something like 4-5x
- photochemsyn 1y agoNo sane person wants to have to share a kitchen and bathroom with random transient strangers, as in the USA's SRO model. This is really where learning from other countries makes sense - in particular, Japan's high population density has led to the micro-apartment - that's a much better option, though probably still requires some regulatory overhaul (and isn't very compatible with car ownership as population density becomes too high): > "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."
- legitster 1y agoWe need to reframe the conversation on public and low cost housing. It's not about providing homes for only the deserving or the hardworking. The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street. Demanding that you only give housing to people who can make it through a treatment program or find gainful employment means most of them are still going to be on the street. Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer. Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it. And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
- mrtesthah 1y agoThis analysis ignores the fact that homelessness itself is by and large the primary cause of mental health issues and drug addiction. It only takes a few missed paychecks before most people would end up on the street.
- baggy_trough 1y ago[flagged]
- gherkinnn 1y agoDepends on the country and its support systems. But there are plenty of stories of rapid decline, even in well run countries. A bad divorce followed by some bad decisions and suddenly you realise you have nowhere else to go but the streets.
- baggy_trough 1y agoYes, it could be the case. But it isn't for most, which was the assertion.
- 1y ago
- socalgal2 1y agoJapan has lots of SROs.
- pcaharrier 1y ago>In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. So the greedy landlords are the would-be heroes of the story and the politicians are the bad guys?
- andrewla 1y agoThis article commits the cardinal sin of homeless discourse -- trying to conflate two things: 1. The "homeless problem", that is, the problem of mentally deranged or violent vagrants that make public spaces less usable or unwelcoming. This is difficult to impossible to measure, both in impact and in extent. 2. The "transient homeless", that is, the down-on-their-luck or otherwise situationally homeless people. This is easy to measure because these people will attempt to secure housing and services to get back on their feet. Fixing #2, while worthwhile in itself, does nothing to fix #1. But well-intentioned people trying to fix "homelessness" find it much easier to address #2 because there are measurable outcomes, and no messy compromises to be made about civil liberties or individual freedom vs civil order. And this relies on the fact that since the same word is used, that it carries the same connotations. People hear "reduce homelessness" and they think that this means fewer people screaming about brainwaves and starting fights on the subway, but that's a completely separate issue. EDIT: removed discussion of SROs to another top level comment to avoid confusing discourse here
- throwmeaway222 1y agoI think there is also 3. Transient homeless that tried to get back on their feet but was met with the notion that all the options were eventually exhausted (they lived on their friend's couch until he got married). They even had dishwasher jobs, but inevitably, because rent was $2000 more than they would ever have - they decided to do drugs and live on the street because no amount of work at the wage they would be paid would ever make their life meaningful.
- tenuousemphasis 1y agoYes, absolutely. They aren't two separate groups, there's essentially a pipeline from group 2 to 1. Imagine struggling with addiction or mental health issues. Now imagine doing it without a safe and secure place to even sleep at night.
- andrewla 1y agoI'm sorry -- I fail to see how "mental health issues" is an interesting version of this. For serious mental health issues (of the form of #1) we simply do not have reliable treatment options aside from involuntary confinement. For drug addiction the problem is more subtle but I question whether this part of the pipeline is worth considering when looking at the problem at scale. There is no serious attempt as far as I'm aware to measure the number of people that transition from #2 to #1 style homelessness, and since it is difficult to measure this it is very likely that solutions to #2 will have no effect on this pipeline.
- gwbas1c 1y ago> A wealth of research has examined the causes of homelessness over the past two decades. These studies consistently find that the cost of housing is by far the primary driver. For example, several studies have concluded that an area’s median rent correlates far more closely with its homelessness rate than factors such as weather, poverty rate, and rates of mental illness or substance use. Curious to know about how homeless correlates to city / town / urban / suburban ect. I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities. Most likely because the cities have services available and the smaller towns don't. My wife works with the homeless where I live, and many in this small city are from the surrounding smaller, more expensive towns/suburbs - because of the lack of services in those towns, and their hostility to homelessness, they hop on a bus and come here because they receive much better care and have more opportunities. I'd imagine this is common elsewhere too.
- andrewla 1y agoWhile the idea of restoring SROs and other dormitory-style housing is a good idea to better serve the lower-cost end of housing, it is completely incompatible with modern ideas around tenant protection. For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants to a degree that is far in excess of what is necessary for a regular apartment or for standalone housing, because by necessity the quarters are much closer. If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable.
- gwbas1c 1y ago> For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants ... If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable. I remember hearing a recent US legal change that makes it easier to forcibly commit mentally ill people. To be quite blunt: Someone who's making an SRO unlivable is mentally ill, and needs to be in a place that's appropriate to handle their needs.
- andrewla 1y agoSomeone that makes an apartment building unlivable is probably mentally ill. The amount of disruption necessary to make an SRO unlivable is much much much lower. Failing to clean up after yourself in the kitchen or bathroom; playing loud music or coming and going at odd hours, even things like having frequent visitors can be enough. SROs and boarding houses used to have all sorts of "unreasonable" restrictions because of the close quarters, and not having those restrictions makes this untenable. Yes, this power will be abused arbitrarily by managers/landlords in racist and classist and ethno-cist (is that a word?) ways. Attempting to prevent that will lead to the same regulatory quagmires that got these things banned in the first place. You just have to accept the mild social injustice. If you cannot then SROs will have to be banned.
- gwbas1c 1y ago> You just have to accept the mild social injustice. Yes: I'm trying to avoid mentioning a recent executive order that helps this. Basically, SROs aren't a place for mentally ill people, because "You just have to accept the mild social injustice."
- MangoToupe 1y agoWe need more public housing. Period. It's disgusting we can't center this.
- potato3732842 1y agoDon't lay this at the feet of government. Government may be sociopathic and unfeeling but the state doesn't generally meddle in petty matters of poor people who have little to no wealth to extract or redirect except to curry favor with other elements of the population. Lay this at the feet of the individuals who thought they knew what was right for everyone and leaned on the government to act. Be that action local zoning, state laws or federal thumb on the scale money with strings attached behavior. Ideally, you'll even see the pattern and use it to crap all over contemporary examples of the same.
- jadenPete 1y agoIt's amazing to me that, in the US, we're discussing deregulation and privatization of so many functional and working parts of the government apparatus (the United States Digital Service, public broadcasting, the post office, etc.), when deregulation of the housing market would probably do the most for public good. Distortion of the market, which includes outlawing SROs, jacks up housing prices and indirectly perpetuates so many societal problems: - Homelessness, which likely worsens mental health, increases drug usage, reduces tourism, creates a massive eyesore for everyone else, etc. - Lack of disposable income—if folks are spending more on a rent or mortgage payment, they're not spending as much on goods and services. - Inequality—artificially constricting the supply of housing creates a game of musical chairs, where some inevitably get left out and, because of that, can't climb up the social ladder. It also favors incumbents who already own homes or received their parents' home. - Sprawl—zoning restrictions stifle the construction of high-density housing, which makes cities inaccessible, increases car dependence, negatively affects the environment, etc.